20 years ago, Star Trek: Enterprise came to a (rather disappointing) end after four seasons, and with that also concluded the Star Trek TV run that had been going since The Next Generation premiered in 1987. But the franchise has been going strong again on the small screen front since 2017 for those with a Paramount+ subscription, with Strange New Worlds Season 3 currently airing on the 2025 TV schedule and Starfleet Academy dropping sometime next year. Now it turns out that Scott Bakula, who starred as Jonathan Archer in Enterprise, is helping put together a follow-up series for his character that sounds intriguing.
Enterprise producer Michael Sussman, who also wrote 22 episodes in the series, informed TrekMovie that he first thought of an idea to revisit Archer around the time Star Trek: Picard Season 3 was ending. Sussamn joked in an email with Bakula about when they’ll “see Star Trek: Archer on Paramount+,” then realized there was an actual nugget of an idea there. Specifically, Sussman and Bakula are keen to explore Archer’s tenure as president of the United Federation of Planets, and they want this show to have the same kind of mature tone that the Star Wars series Andor had. As Sussman put it:
One of my aspirations would be that the series could do for Star Trek, what Andor did for Star Wars. It’s a show where you can tell adult stories about adults and tell them in a very grounded, realistic way.
The premise for this potential show originates from the Enterprise episode “A Mirror Darkly Part II,” where the evil Mirror Universe read information about his Prime Universe counterpart found in the database of the USS Defiant, a Prime Universe ship previously seen the Original Series episode “The Tholian Web” that had been sent back in time. There was a graphic showing that Archer entered the political life after retiring as an admiral in Starfleet and eventually achieved his presidential position in the Federation, which founded six years after the main events of Enterprise, as seen in the controversial series finale. Well, it turns out it was Michael Sussman himself who came up with this piece of trivia.
Sussman and Scott Bakula are calling this series Star Trek: United, with the former also comparing it to shows like The West Wing, Homeland and The Diplomat. Upon getting Bakula’s approval, Sussman took his “high-level overview” of United to Secret Hideout, the production company run by Alex Kurtzman, who’s been overseeing the Star Trek franchise’s TV side. The meeting apparently went well, and Sussman had been preparing a follow-up pitch going over “a pilot story, character arcs, and episode ideas.”
However, Secret Hideout and Paramount decided not to move forward with further development on the idea, and Michael Sussman and Scott Bakula have gone on to work on a non-Star Trek project together. Following Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount, Sussman is hopeful that he and Bakula can re-pitch Star Trek: United to the new regime. There was even a point where they decided to move the show’s setting from Earth to the planet Babel in order to thematically differentiate itself from Starfleet Academy, though it’s unclear if that change stuck.
While Star Trek: Enterprise is by no means my favorite of the franchise’s shows, I did like Scott Bakula’s portrayal of Jonathan Archer, and Star Trek: United sounds like a good way to catch up with him in a different kind of environment putting his political savvy to good use. If the day comes that United is added to the list of upcoming Star Trek TV shows, count on CinemaBlend to pass that news along.
